Should We Choose Morality or Tolerance?

Why can't we have it all?

Nassim Taleb writes in Skin in the Game that morality is best understood as the set of norms that bind you to your tribe (kind of like a code of conduct at a country club). Obey the rules in exchange for the benefits that come from belonging; disobey, get kicked out. You can always civilization shop if you don’t like the civilization you’re in (or struggle to change the code through reform or revolt) but you can’t avoid civilization itself.

The tighter the tribe, the tighter the norms, the more unforgiving the punishment for disloyalty. The thinner the tribe, the looser the norms, the more tolerant the tribe is of divergence and lukewarm fealty.

Morality and Tolerance are inversely correlated.

Strong relationships are less liberal than societies that are value-agnostic. Families and religious groups are less liberal than Western democratic states. And a self that was purely tolerant would have no substance, no differentiation. Intolerance is a point of identity. Don’t tell me what you like, but what you hate.

The price we pay for morality is intolerance of dissent, disobedience, divergence. But what we gain are ties that bind. The price we pay for tolerance is a lack of distinction, identity, personality, closeness, connection, purpose.

Tolerance exists because morality doesn’t scale.

If there were one, universal moral code (a country club in which all humans belonged equally, and excluding all non-humans severely), we should expect it to be intolerant, illiberal.

Questions:

The question should not be “Are you liberal or illiberal, but, at what scale are you illiberal or liberal?

On my argument, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as a tolerant or intolerant person, just a person who is more or less willing to scale their highly localized morality to a more general level. In fact, you would expect that people who are liberal with respect to strangers and foreigners should be far less liberal with respect to themselves and their loved ones.

Given that one can’t have a strong sense of “we,” without intolerance and exclusion, wouldn’t it be better (and more clarifying) to scrap over-used HR words like “inclusive” and “inclusion” and instead focus on what you are explicitly exclusive of (unless of course “inclusive” is already code for a certain set of exclusions)?